The scene: Western Sydney‘s massive Eastern Creek
Raceway. The weather: Woodstock-esque. The crowd around 30,000. Trent Reznor is
sitting about a kilometer from the stage site, his jeans inscribed with a rough
pen-drawn heart. Two lines are crossed diagonally through the drawing, making
any rite of passage into the organ virtually impossible. The glint of well-tested
metal is clearly visible through the ravaged leather of his steel capped boots.
Reznor looks every inch the world’s-most-forgotten-boy that Iggy Pop once
claimed to be, yet with deeper, more open wounds. Today’s rain, Reznor comments,
has “changed a pleasant concert going experience into a survival endurance test.”
He smiles
and quietly laughs.
“We had our
rainy concert this tour…”
Five hours later, as a lingering natural & man-made
fog shrouds the dampened stage Reznor‘s nine inch nails will issue forth their unique
brand of raging sonic violence, including some incredibly savage… er… “choreography.”
It’s closer to an act of aural projectile hurling than rock & roll as it s
recognized. Surely this guy must freak himself
out sometimes.
“I‘ve done that more sitting in the studio,“
says Reznor, “thinking of stuff and coming up with ideas wondering if I should even
say that. Almost being afraid to explore certain parts of what I’m thinking
about. ‘Do I really want to go down that path? Do I really want to be the spokesman
of saying…’ It’s not like a conversation with you. It’s a conversation with X amount
of millions of people that might relate to it. Is it responsible to do that? I‘ve
been more freaked out by that than live, where there’s times that things will dick
and things work, but I can’t say there’s any time when I’ve really… Unless we’ve
been in such an altered state of consciousness. Which does occur
occasionally....“
As explored in the January issue of huH, Reznor
is still a little perplexed when he stands on stage and gazes out into the crowd.
He’s constantly having to come to grips with his growing success and what he and
his band of scary men have become.
“I think at its most surface it’s another entity
that puts out product and hopes to continue to do that. But I like to use the
platform as something to get some subversive messages out there. I had a
problem coming to terms with the fact that we started to sell more records. I
understood the audience up to about 100,000— and then we did Lollapalooza first
year and got real big, then a gold record and this record’s almost two million
now in America. You start to look out and you don t recognize
those faces. I’m not sure who they are. It’s mole culture. It’s younger people
and it‘s more out of touch people, I think. At first it was kind of difficult, because
the first thing that happens is that the people you had catered to and were
part of a scene start to turn their backs on you because you’ve infiltrated a
more mass arena...“
But surely infiltration is the beautiful part.
“Yeah, but it can also be a painful thing when
your favorite magazine that liked you and you bought as a fan… now you’re not
so cool because their little sister likes
you. Even though I think the integrity of the music that nine inch nails has
put out has stayed… or improved hopefully.”
Back to that first Lollapalooza. Is your relationship
with Henry Rollins any better than it was then?
“It was just… I think at the time we irritated
him because there was a buzz about nine inch nails and we were the guys with no
credibility. We were the young guys on the tour. I think he felt he hat the
weight of all ‘punk rock‘ on his back and he deserved his moment. I‘ve come to actually
enjoy his music and I think a lot of what he does is pretty good. He irritated
me on a personal level, but…
You did a show with Guns N‘ Roses at Wembley
Stadium in London several years back at Axl Rose‘s instigation. Do you get any
feedback from Axl these days?
“I heard from him right before we started this
tour. That was kind of when… the downfall of Guns N Roses was just reaching the
bottom. He was just kind of freaked out and talking about maybe working on some
kind of project. I said, ‘Let me know.‘ I’m into at least listening to ideas. I
haven‘t had any (other) contact.”
He‘s got an interesting mind. I think there‘s a
lot more going on there than people give him credit for.
“With Axl? Yeah. I feel a certain degree of compassion
just because he was thrust into something that was larger than anything else —
and then a lot of weight was placed on him to carry the torch. If I had to pick
something that I think was wrong with how they were treated, it was that no-one
had the balls to say, ‘No. No it’s not a good idea to put out two double
albums of mediocre material.‘ But if you said that you got fired so... I think that‘s inherently the problem. I think the guy’s
talented at what he’s doing.”
So how do you see your next album? A departure
from the Spiral stuff?
“I’m not far enough into it to have anything
concrete to say about it...but I’d like to work on a record that‘s more songoriented,
more collaborative. That‘s more interesting to me right now than climbing down
into another hole for two years — by myself. It may end up being that but…”
Murray Engleheart
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